Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

161nm to go.

Literally within a minute or two after writing yesterday’s blog the winds picked up and stayed there. Not significantly but enough to start moving the boat between 5 & 6 knots. Suddenly we were looking at solid ETAs during the day of 5/3 and building up a decent safety margin to arrive before dusk that day. My spirits were certainly sent soaring by this improvement after 3-4 days of sluggishness.

With just 2 days left to go I performed an important pre arrival task which was to place beers in the fridge. We don’t drink alcohol during passage but we can certainly prepare for our first evening at anchor.

More labouriously all three of us worked together to reverse our 300ft chain. Not sure if this is something I’ve ranted on about before but this was the chain we received in Grenada that turned out to have superficial galvanization and is currently quickly turning to rust. The company have promised to credit us but so far have lacked in any follow through. Reversing the chain will allow us to put the better end of the chain in the water for the next few months before we deep six it somewhere along the way to New Zealand.

One chore that we can see ahead of us once we’ve anchored is barnacle removal. Where the paint has worn we can see the odd patch of barnacles / filter feeders that have grown during our passage no doubt receiving a constant stream of nutrients from the flow of water over our hulls. Hopefully there aren’t too many patches but where there are it’s going to be hard work.

So, as I write this I can fairly confidently predict we’ll be arriving in Fatu Hiva tomorrow afternoon. We’ve covered 2,863nm through the water so far. The final few miles feels like nothing at all. We have one more night of watches before we can all get a solid nights rest. Soon we’ll be able to walk further than the length of the boat on ground that is not constantly moving. That will be novel.

Well we’re 2 days from landfall unless something amazing happens.

Me and Steve swapped the anchor chain around from end to end, the really rusty end is now attached to the boat and the not so rusty end to the chain. A very dirty job, but one that sort of needed to be done before we arrived.

Steve has put some beers in the fridge to cool. It feels a bit more like we’re coming to the end.

No fish 🙁

Another day of pleasant sedate sailing. Steve set up the ETA countdown on our display. In the afternoon our ETA was around 77 hours. That’s only three more days. We could make it before sunset of May 3rd.
At the end of my night shift our eta was around 79 hours. Are we in the twilight zone!!!

279nm to go.

This feels like drawing teeth. The wind is right behind us. We’ve been sailing wing on wing most of the time and we’re covering almost exactly the distance required each day to arrive at sunset on May 3rd. It’s frustrating to think that we would probably be making landfall today if it wasn’t for our own home goal. I want to fully recharge the batteries on arrival so that opens up the possibility of running the genset for a few hours before we arrive and make up any shortfall on the last day – as long as it is a short shortfall. We’ll just plod on.

A few days ago I calculated that Fatu Hiva, on a perfectly clear day, should become visible over the horizon at a distance of 75nm. That means our first glimpse of land could be at dawn on our last day. That will be something to look forward to.

We performed another wash on day 19 as the seas remained calm. This allows us to play catch up on the battery charging as we’re still unable to regenerate at these speeds and we’re not making much from the wind. What rubs our noses in it is to hear that practically all the other boats in our little fleet that we hear from on the daily net are experiencing winds in the 15 to 20 knot range whereas we and just one other boat are down around 10 where our standard sails leave us under canvassed. I harp on.

It’s interesting to note each day the order in which the list of email radio stations appear. We’ve passed the point of equidistance between Panama and New Zealand so we see more and more New Zealand stations appearing near the top of the list although the nearest are still in Hawaii and California. That won’t last for long. I’ve tried accessing the NZ stations from time to time but have had no luck so far.

As a result of not hearing the ‘nut alarm’ on day 18 when we caught the second tuna I made a second alarm today. Using clothes pegs, some copper strip, some old telephone and network cable and connecting these to the ‘choo choo train’ noise maker for our mexican domino set I created an alarm that will set the train noise off if one of our two lines takes a hit. It went off accidentally once so the system works it seems. No fish though.

An inspection of the pin on the boom gooseneck revealed the retaining pin to have broken and the pin partially out. We fixed this making a new metal washer to hopefully place less stress on the replacement pin. Not sure about corrosion as we now have two metals there so this will need some further examination further on down the line. All this wing on wing sailing puts some stress on the rig as we get occasional back winding of the sails. Despite the use of preventer lines tied down to the cleats this does put stresses on that concern me. Once we’ve made Fatu Hiva we’ll have a whole set of different sailing angles to go on which will get us out of this mode.

Here’s hoping the weather gods favour us with a little more wind today so we can get ahead of our timetable for possible arrival in two days.

Not much to report.

Speeds are still rubbish, but we are getting there slowly.

Steve made an alarm system for the fishing lines. He MacGyvered something out of copper, clothes pegs, telephone wire and my suggestion for the alarm, the annoying train sound thing out of the train dominoes game.

It took a few hours to complete and test, would be nice to have some fish to test it out for real.